Flight

Fly the shit-faced skies.

Flight is about as subtle as a plane crash. And the plane crash at the beginning of Flight
ain’t too subtle, either. At 30,000 feet, a commercial airliner
carrying more than 100 passengers descends suddenly into free fall above
rural Atlanta. Its pilot, Capt. William “Whip” Whitaker (Denzel
Washington)—who is seen earlier surreptitiously gulping a screwdriver—is
passed out in his seat. Jolted awake, Whitaker takes the controls and,
with the composure of someone parallel parking a Smart Car, guides the
craft into a roll, slowing its downward trajectory enough to land the
plane relatively calmly in a field. He saves the lives of nearly
everyone on board but clips the steeple of a small church on the way
down, thus kicking off a film packed with references to “acts of God”
(in both the legal and metaphorical sense), a montage of heroin use set
to “Under the Bridge” and, near its end, a close-up of a single tear
rolling down a cheek.

That the crash itself is shot with armrest-clasping terror isn’t surprising: After all, the best part of Cast Away,
director Robert Zemeckis’ last live-action film before embarking on a
decade of motion-capture animation, was the scene of Tom Hanks’ doomed
cargo plane going down in the middle of the Pacific. And the fact that
an intriguing premise gets smashed to bits by a sledgehammer of
sentiment isn’t surprising, either: Zemeckis also made Forrest Gump. But with Flight,
he squanders a rich opportunity to question the nature of heroism in
the Media Age: Would we, for instance, think any different of Chesley
“Sully” Sullenberger’s 2009 heroics on the Hudson if we knew he was out
doing blow and banging flight attendants the night before? Instead, Flight is basically a movie about how flying planes drunk is a bad idea.

Even Washington, so
often preternaturally commanding, is at a loss. Granted, he’s got little
to work with: Whitaker is, theoretically, a complex man, but John
Gatins’ script reduces him to an alcoholic in denial. Washington’s turn,
all stuttering and bitter-beer face, offers only a glimpse of how his
self-parodying Pacino Years will look. Then again, this is a movie that,
at its dramatic climax, takes a jarring, implausible slide into Hangover-style drug humor. It’s a wreck nobody had a chance of surviving. R.